 |
|
March 25, 2007
My Day In The Hills, courtesy of the great Alternative Holidays
Phew!
I hope.
Let me explain.
I thought I was going to have to refer to something without being able to name my source. I hate people doing that. At a dinner party where I was sitting two away from her, a friend once used a line of mine without naming me as its source. All right, it was only me describing a local resident with a Billy Bunter grown too old to dream of the tuck shop thing going on; mauve cardigan over string vest, specs with thick lenses, brown suede shoes and baby’s hair: and how he was the type ripe for the police to swoop on his bungalow during his daily stint by the swings to check his hard drive for kiddie porn. It wasn’t a line from any of my scripts. But still.
Reviewing Parachutes and Kisses for Newsday in 1984, Florence King takes the author, Erica Jong, to task for not naming sources. Having said that “Jong’s sow-in-heat prose is impossible to quote in a newspaper”, that she strains so hard for metaphors “we need Lamaze panting exercises to get through her sentences” and that “the book is as cluttered as the remainder table where it deserves to end up”, King writes that “of her better sentences, two sound suspiciously familiar”. The first is “During sex one has a man’s undivided attention” which, she comments, is much too crisp and epigrammatic to have come from Erica Jong’s sledgehammer, and that Mrs. Patrick Campbell is its most likely source. “The second is from The L-Shaped room by Lynne Reid Banks, who attributed it to Irish fold Wisdom. Jong doesn’t attribute it to anybody.”
As if this wasn’t enough of a warning, the review ends: “In my view, Erica Jong is a disgrace to womanhood and the publishing world as well.”
Of course, Florence King isn’t going to read my blog, but the fear is still out there, and I didn’t dare not name my source. I just hope I’ve got it right.
It concerns doing things properly. And ’m hoping that in Kiss of the Spider Woman, Molina, who works as a window dresser, sings of putting a scarf in a manikin’s jacket pocket. The scarf is invisible; but Molina knows that it’s there, and a woman that wore such an outfit would have it there.
I just gigged for Alternative Holidays in Val Thorens; and from the first phone call with Karl in marketing and events, through the fee I was offered, via shipping me out there, the staff, the theatre, Antonio: a Solor who put the arr! into warrior, the food, the stay overnight, to shipping me back, everything was done properly.
Beautiful place. Not fair Galina calling it Gay Colditz
Through nobody’s fault but the snow’s, there was a two hour delay getting from Geneva airport to the resort. The reception staff were straight out to the coach park unloading bags, commiserating and handing out truly better-making non-alcoholic cocktails. Craig, who could be David Peden’s long-lost twin, shook my hand while hoping that I was Madame Galina?
“Thank God you’re here. I thought I’d have to be putting on a tutu and doing it myself tonight. Was the coach journey horrible?”
“No. It was the most gorgeous scenery – Albertville and the lake - and I felt terribly Bond Girl when we went up the mountain. And I had my book.”
He handed me over to Jeff, who runs the theatre. “It isn’t La Scala”, Jeff warned, “but it’s my home for five months.”
The theatre was in one of the bars, the stage was a good size, the technicians’ box was clearly visible, and there was nowhere that punters would be out of sight and might start talking.
And backstage, as overseen by Jeff, was La Scala. Hung with papier-mâché headpieces, lamé, feather boas and paste tiaras, it was spotlessly clean, brightly lit, and with everything I might need laid out: spare make-up, eyelash glue, sewing kit, an iron, Antonio. Just kidding. Antonio...
The whump of gorgeous quads down the backstage stairs, a wifebeater beneath a haze of black and tan, a smile that would take mere seconds to re-split a healed hernia.
“Hello. I am Antonio. I’m the resort manager.”
Imagine Giacamo Ciriaci having partaken of the bigger-making side of the mushroom. I remember giving him my hand to shake, but I don’t think I said anything because I’d forgotten who I was. Jeff came to my rescue, asking me if I thought I might need anything ironed and when did I want to do a sound check?
They wondered if my answer was in some kind of dialect.
Up in the theatre, I went over the sound and lighting cues with Timothy and Ju-Ju. They had the more exciting job of being club DJ’s at curtain down, but paid me the rare compliment at show time of sitting and paying attention. At a couple of cabaret gigs I’ve had where the show techy was also the DJ, he put on my CD at the first cue then left it to run rough shod over all the subsequent cues. And while I ad-libbed frantically to anyone anywhere in the venue that this shouldn’t be happening, he was in the impenetrable dark at the back of the sound box shoving stuff up his nose and/or shoving bits of himself into a groupy.
The show went well, considering I was playing to a group of people that spent over ten hours getting to Val Thorens and were only not in bed because they were gay and there was a party afterward. I got Antonio onstage for the audition, in spite of my earlier promise not to, because he lumbered me with a stooge who was both a real Russian and a trained ballet dancer. Sasha, like Galina a Muscovite, spoke to me in that terribly working class dialect that Galina’s grandmother refused to let her learn, and did the most gorgeous, meant to be upstaging, fouettés. I warned him if he carried on like there would be some nice Polonium for him to lick off the window of the ski-lift next morning.
Oh, by the way, I was terribly showing off my French in the resort. I set the cues for Timothy and Juju in it, talked shop to Jeff in it, and when Antonio arranged for my bags to be taken from the theatre to the accommodation, I gave him my room-number in it.
“Six hundred and twenty-three” I said in my best Montmartre accent.
I was actually in two hundred and sixty-three. The nice woman who found my stuff in her room when she went up to bed, brought it back down.
“This has to be the ballerina’s”, she told reception. “And we use the same mascara…”
Meanwhile, I was in the bar, having a beer with Gabriele Neroni, who as it turned out was the reason I was in Val Thorens performing for Alternative Holidays. I knew I knew him from somewhere.
“You got me on the stage for the Pas De Deux at the Jewish Aids Trust Gala in 2000. So, when I came to work for Alternative, I got them to book you."
“Aw”, said Mike my manager at the time, “look at Galina getting her first review in the Jewish Chronicle”, and you’d think from his head on one side pride he was reading the announcement of her first born.
Talking obliquely of which, I did one of my last Hog the Limelight tour gigs a few Saturdays ago. In the foyer was the montage of a dressing-room, with pointe shoes round the mirror lights, telegrams, flowers, photographs of Pavlova, Markova and Fonteyn and a cast list for Manon.
“Oh, this is fab!”
A smock and cords wearing lady resident in town said she was responsible. “So glad you like it, I didn’t know if you would.”
I picked up the cast list.
“Oh, look,” I said. “The gaoler’s played by Thomas Whitehead. We have a running gag going that he’s going to marry Galina.”
I swear she clapped her hands with joy.
“Oh, and would it be ever so romantic then if you were to come back and do a performance as Manon to his Gaoler for us one day?”
Er…
“Oh, yes”, I said, “terribly romantic.”
Well, I couldn’t tell her, could I?
 |
 | ||||||||
|
| ||||||||
|
| ||||||||
|
| ||||||||
|
| ||||||||